SansPoint

The Progress Made, the Things to Come

I began this year with a list of ten books I want to read[1], and two-and-a-half months into the year, I’ve completed two of them. Considering the time left, and the eventual opening up of my schedule (with any luck) after May, I think I’m on track to accomplish the goal set out.

The first one I attacked was the excellent, bizarre, and strange House of Leaves. It’s my first real exposure to Ergodic literature, and the odd looks I’m sure I got on the subway as I turned the book around 360º to read passages that placed oddly on the page were absolutely worth it.

The second book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, at least to me, lived up to its audacious title. I can certainly see why some would find Dave Eggers’s writing style to be obnoxious. His stylistic… quirks, let’s call them… are intense, self-referential, and obvious. However, I’m a sucker for the metafictional device. If there’s anyone fit to write an introduction to Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories, it’s Eggers, no question.[2]

I’m about to start in on The Stone Raft by José Saramago, which has been sitting on my shelf for close to a year and a half. Well, not so much sitting on my shelf, as in a special, reserved section for books borrowed from others. My wonderful, understanding, girlfriend lent to me, not long after I finished The Double, and it’s sat with me since. I love Saramago’s style. His run-on sentences look imposing, but once you get into it, it feels like a printed version of a proper, old-fashioned storyteller speaking to you from across a campfire; albeit, a storyteller who concocts bizarre tales of exact duplicate people and the Iberian peninsula breaking off from Europe and floating out to sea.

After this, I think I’ll move on to Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. I’ve harped on how much I love his work before, and it’s been said that Kafka is his best since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I’d like to see if that’s true.


  1. This list, I should point out, exists to describe personal reading. As I am a student at the time of this writing, I have quite a heavy load of academic reading to do, and I’ve certainly read more than just two books in the past 2.5 months. ↩
  2. I’ve been meaning to buy a subscription to McSweeney’s, but the money’s just not there for now. ↩

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